Building an Audience w/ Robert Rose

We asked Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Advisor at the Content Marketing Institute, his thoughts on the content marketing challenge of building an audience. Here’s what he told us:

Transcript:

“I’m here to talk about some of your biggest content questions. Building an audience was one of the biggest challenges we saw in our latest research which just came out in Content Marketing. Those that were truly successful with content marketing were really focusing on this idea of building an audience. The biggest jump, quite frankly, in all the years we’ve done the research.

The idea here is that one of the things we have to stop doing is looking at content as a replacement for advertising or direct marketing pieces. Content itself should be building something. That something it’s building is an audience. The way to think about that is ‘What is it that you want to subscribe to?’ When we create a subscriber, it’s not for that thing that they got, that white paper, that blog post or that infographic, it’s for all the other ones that are promised to them in the future. Think about that for a second: when you subscribe to a magazine, that’s what you’re subscribing to, not the one that you are holding in your hands, but the one that’s going to come to you every single month for the next twelve months. You’re wanting to subscribe to the promise, the consistent delivery of great content.

We need to think in the same way: if you think of any company or brand that has created a wonderful content marketing program, it is one that has created something worth subscribing to, and that itself builds an audience.

Look at your content marketing program almost like a product. It is developing the product, the media platform, that you wish to deliver that people want to subscribe to. Now whether you call that a blog, a resource center, an online university, a digital magazine, a series of webinars, the idea is that you are building something where all the content works together thematically that ultimately builds what I like to call an addressable audience. Because that addressable audience is one that we can address through email, text, visible print, whatever it is – you can address them at any time and consistently deliver the content they expect.

Look at it like a product, take that product and then work backwards to all of the big tentpole pieces that you would think need to be consistent within something that’s worth subscribing to, and then put a plan together that slowly builds that over time.

I know it sounds like not a big secret, it’s looking at content as a platform that people want to subscribe to.”